System:

• CachyOS + Hyprland + Caelestia Shell
• GPU: RTX 2050 (nvidia-open-dkms 595.58.03)
• Kernel: 7.0.0-1-cachyos

Problem:
GPU usage drops from 80% to 20% every 5-6 seconds in all games
Clock and watts remain constant during the drop
Happens in Rocket League, Ghost of Tsushima, and all Proton games
Happens since day 1 on Linux

Tested and ruled out:

• nvidia.NVreg_EnableGpuFirmware=0 (ignored by open driver)
• SDL_VIDEODRIVER=x11
• Gamescope
• Caelestia closed
• Snapper disabled
• Multiple Proton versions (GE, UMU, cachyos-slr)
• Clock locked with nvidia-smi --lock-gpu-clocks

nvidia-smi during stutter:
GPU: 20%, Clock: 1755MHz, Power: 33W (unchanged)

1 Like

Have you tried different kernels (e.g. LTS)?

But dwouu is probably right, it’s most likely the dreaded Nvidia+Wayland combination. I haven’t had issues with Wayland on this desktop machine, knock on wood, but my Nvidia laptops struggle with it in various ways, which all goes away when switching to X11.

You could try running sudo journalctl -f while gaming, to see if the logs provide any hints.

Could also try switching to a different scheduler, like lavd. SCX Manager is the easiest way to try.